Reading Derrida and Ricoeur

Eftichis Pirovolakis

Description

Written in the aftermath of the deaths of the French philosophers Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), this book is an important and innovative study of the contentious relation between deconstruction and hermeneutics. Offering close readings of Derrida's and Ricoeur's writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralist linguistics, and Levinasian ethics, Eftichis Pirovolakis introduces the motif of 'improbable encounters,' and explicates why the two thinkers may be said to be simultaneously close to each other and separated by an unbridgeable abyss. Pirovolakis complicates any facile distinction between these movements, which are two of the most influential streams of continental thought, and questions a certain pathos with respect to the distance separating them. Pirovolakis also translates Derrida's brief tribute to Ricoeur: "The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling," which appears here in English for the first time. The book is essential reading for anyone immersed in continental philosophy or literary theory.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Ricoeur on Husserl and Freud: From a Perceptual to a Reflective Present

Ricoeur Reading Husserl: The Thick Present and Continuity
Freud’s Quantitative Hypothesis and Unconscious Autonomy
From a Perceptual to a Reflective Present

2. Derrida and Rhythmic Discontinuity

Husserl’s Aporia: Discontinuity and Repetition
The Necessary Possibility of Difference and Syncopated Temporality
Freud: Permeability and Impermeability, Life and Death
First Inscription and Nachträglichkeit
Scriptural Metaphorics

3. Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self

The Singularity of the Speaking Subject
Idem and Ipse: From Narrative Identity to the Ethical Self
Benevolent Selfhood
Oneself as Another
Concluding Remarks

4. Secret Singularities

Spacing, Iterability, Signatures
Secrets of Speech
Originary Mourning: In Memory of the Absolutely Other
An Unexperienced Experience: The Absolute Arrivant
Expropriation

Conclusion

Appendix: “The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling,” by Jacques Derrida

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Philosophie du langage
• Linguistics

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 16 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438429519
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 14 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series: Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor

Reading Derrida and Ricoeur
Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics
Eftichis Pirovolakis

“The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling” by Jacques Derrida was originally published in French as: “La parole: Donner, nommer, appeler,” in Paul Ricoeur , ed. Myriam Revault d'Allones and François Azouvi, L'Herne, no. 81 (Paris: Éditions de L'Herne, 2004) 19–25, Copyright © 2004 Éditions de L'Herne. It is reproduced here with permission by Éditions de L'Herne and Marguerite Derrida. English translation © 2010 Eftichis Pirovolakis.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pirovolakis, Eftichis, 1970–
Reading Derrida and Ricoeur : improbable encounters between deconstruction and hermeneutics / Eftichis Pirovolakis.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-2949-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Deconstruction. 2. Derrida, Jacques—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Ricœur, Paul—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Phenomenology and literature. 5. Hermeneutics. 6. Literature—Philosophy. 7. Criticism—History—20th century. I. Title.
PN98.D43P57 2010
801'.95—dc22                                                                                                         2009014349
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Antony and Cleopatra

Acknowledgments
In the course of writing this book, I have been indebted to the support and friendship of many people. I would like to thank Laura Marcus and Vicky Margree for their help and vital advice; Sean Gaston for his friendship and numerous thought-provoking conversations on Derrida and Ricoeur; the anonymous readers for State University of New York Press for their encouraging and constructive comments; and the series editor Charles Shepherdson and James Peltz for helping the finished manuscript through its last stages.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Joanna Hodge and Nick Royle for examining my Sussex doctoral thesis on which this book is based, for kindly making available to me some of their unpublished papers and for their very positive contributions towards the completion of this project. I am especially grateful to Céline Surprenant for her vital supervisory role during the later stages of the research, and for her generosity in reading very closely and offering incisive criticism and invaluable advice on the original manuscript. I am also greatly indebted to Geoff Bennington for the range of knowledge he has brought to my work, for helping me clarify my arguments at certain important points during the early stages of this project and, most of all, for continuous inspiration and encouragement since 1993. Very special and singular thanks are due to Vassiliki Dimitropoulou for her patience, understanding, and overall support.
Finally, I would like to record my gratitude to the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for its financial assistance between 2001 and 2004, and to Marguerite Derrida and Éditions de L'Herne for kindly authorizing the translation into English of Jacques Derrida's “La parole: Donner, nommer, apeller,” which appears here as an appendix. Some of the arguments on Ricoeur's narrative theory in the second section of chapter 3 have been anticipated in my “ ‘Donner À Lire’: Unreadable Narratives,” Literature Interpretation Theory 19, no. 2 (2008): 100–122.

List of Abbreviations
The following abbreviations will be used in the main body of the text and the notes. They will be followed by volume number, where appropriate, and page number to the English translation. Details of the edition referred to appear under the author's name and title in the bibliography.

Works by Jacques Derrida AF     Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression AP     Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth” FSW    “Freud and the Scene of Writing” GD     The Gift of Death LI    “Limited Inc a b c …” MPM     Mémoires: For Paul de Man PG     The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy PM    “Perhaps or Maybe” SEC    “Signature Event Context” SP     Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs SF    “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’ ” VM    “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas” W    “The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling”

Works by Paul Ricoeur FM     Fallible Man FP     Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation H     Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology IT     Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning MHF     Memory, History, Forgetting OA     Oneself as Another QS    “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology” RM     The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language SWE    “Structure, Word, Event” TA     From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II TN     Time and Narrative

Works by Sigmund Freud SE     The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

Works by Edmund Husserl CM     Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology Ideas I     Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology PITC     The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness

Introduction
An encounter simultaneously tangential, tendentious, and intangible begins to emerge but also slips away.
—Jacques Derrida, “The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling”
Any account of the contentious relation between Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida cannot fail to be marked, initially at least, by a feeling of melancholy and a certain mournfulness. Not only because the two thinkers, having recently passed away within only a few months of each other, will not have the opportunity to contribute to or revisit the various debates in which they jointly participated for approximately fifty years. But also because, even when they were alive, most of their public encounters could be described, at best, as missed opportunities of a fruitful dialogue. Hence a sense of sorrowfulness with respect to the distance separating deconstruction and hermeneutics, those two most influential streams of contemporary European thought.
The first public instance of a miscarried dialogue was a roundtable discussion following a conference on “Communication” in Montreal in 1971, organized by The Association of the Society for Philosophy in the French Language. 1 Both Ricoeur and Derrida contributed formal presentations to the conference and actively participated in the roundtable discussion, which was dominated, to say the least, by an animated confrontation between them. 2 A debate between the two thinkers apparently did take place at the time. Considering, however, that the word debate implies the willingness of each partner in a conversation to resolve any initial disagreement by being open to what the other has to say, or, according to its Latin etymon , the reversal of an incipient discordance, 3 it is clear that this exchange constituted, rather, a spirited altercation. And even though Derrida, on three or four occasions, begins responding by declaring that he agrees with Ricoeur, he hastens to temper and complicate this scene of agreement by adding another twist to his argument. Whether the dichotomy between semiology and semantics, the event of signature, or différance is at issue, Ricoeur and Derrida seem to be talking at cross-purposes throughout this discussion. At certain points, the confrontation becomes so lively that the two interlocutors cannot help interrupting each other, thereby rendering the possibility of a patient dialogue very difficult indeed.
Nor is a series of publications that appeared in the seventies on metaphor a debate, as in none of the three texts of this exchange do they fully engage with each other's arguments. The first one, Derrida's “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (1971), is a “deconstructive” interpretation of the vicissitudes of metaphor in philosophical discourse and does not contain any reference to Ricoeur. 4 It is the latter who instigates the polemic by providing, in the eighth study of The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (1975), a critical reading of Derrida's essay. 5 In no way does that reading amount to a detailed response to Derrida. Ricoeur chooses to focus on two very specific aspects of “White Mythology,” whose argument, moreover, he hastily assimilates to Heidegger's conviction that the metaphorical exists only within the limits of metaphysics, and to which he devotes just a few pages. Finally, “The Retrait of Metaphor” (1978) was supposed to be Derrida's rejoinder to Ricoeur's polemical comments. 6 Yet, the explicit references to Ricoeur are limited to a few observations to the effect that he mistakenly attributed to Derrida assertions that “White Mythology” was specifically intended to put into question. Derrida goes on to devote the largest part of his essay to a meticulous examination of certain Heideggerian motifs. As a result, their debate on metaphor could also be portrayed as a failed attempt to engage in constructive dialogue. 7
More recently, in his Memory, History, Forgetting (2000), Ricoeur affirmatively draws attention to Derrida's paradoxical formulation that forgiveness is impossible to the extent that one, in orde